


how good it was

by screamlet



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 08:07:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8971267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: Honestly, they had a good run in the old Potter house. Three years in the same place was a long run for Remus. Now it was July 1980, baby Harry or Harriet was due in a week, and it was time to go.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waldorph](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waldorph/gifts).



Honestly, they had a good run in the old Potter house. Three years in the same place was a long run for Remus; maybe seven years at Hogwarts should have instilled in him a sense of stability, but it didn’t. Hogwarts seemed like a dream too good to be true, and if he had stopped for even a moment to reflect on how good he had it, how lucky he was, he would wake up.

Hogwarts was three years ago. Now it was July 1980, baby Harry or Harriet was due any moment, and it was time to go. 

*

Peter had left as soon as Lily announced to the three of them that she was pregnant; it was time to move on, Peter said, while Sirius scoffed and made excuses so Peter would stay (and so Remus would stay, because _Sirius_ was staying, of that there was no question). _The fuck are you talking about, Pete, leaving now at a time like this, leaving Lil and James in the fucking lurch when they need the three best wizards on the fucking planet to keep them safe_. 

Peter might have stayed, maybe, if Remus had said something, but Remus didn’t have Sirius’s good reasons or Peter O’Toole’s booming voice for persuasive speeches. Remus was sitting on the couch, his hands folded at his knees, looking at Peter and then looking away again. The more Sirius and James and Lily encouraged Peter to stay, the more Remus stayed quiet and rehearsed what he might say if they ever shut up, if they ever asked.

_If you can go, and if you think you should go, then go. I have to stay. I’m the poor relation everyone warned James about. No money, no connections, steady work for two or three weeks at a time, so I understand that you need to go, but I could use you here, Peter. Lily and James can take care of themselves, but I could use you here, someone who lives here because they want to, not because they have nowhere else to go._

But saying that in front of Sirius would be the quickest way to break all of them up, because Sirius ran away from home at 16 and he would never do anything again because he _had_ to. He was cut off from the Black (and Malfoy and Lestrange) family finances, but he stayed with James and Lily because they were his friends and he _wanted_ to live with his friends. He learned cleaning spells because he _wanted_ to help, because like hell Lily was going to stop her potions research for the Order just to clean the pots and pans and plates and utensils they used at every meal like a bunch of animals. He dug into schoolbooks he had thrown into the Potters’ library with the intention of never opening again, until they needed stronger defenses for the house, stronger than Remus and James could manage on their own. He _wanted_ to make their house a fortress, for their friends, for their baby, for themselves. 

Asking Peter to stay, because he and Sirius _had_ to stay? No. Unthinkable. 

Lily noticed. Lily always noticed.

“You’ve been very quiet,” she said to him, drawing everyone’s attention to Remus and his folded hands sitting on the couch.

“I have,” he said. “You should stay, Peter.”

“SEE,” Sirius yelled. “Even REMUS thinks moving out now is a stupid fucking—”

“I didn’t say that,” Remus said sharply. “I said Peter should stay, because he’s my friend and we’ve lived together for half our fucking lives and I want him to stay.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “Yeah, we have. But we’ve—”

Oh, god, Peter was going to say it, Peter was going to fucking say it and he and Sirius would have to leave, too. Sirius would leave out of sheer stupid stubborn idiot pride, and then Remus would have to leave, too, because there was no way Remus the polite young man and _Remus the werewolf_ were going to live with his friend James and his pregnant friend Lily. 

“—gotta grow up sometime, don’t we, Remus?”

Remus shrugged one shoulder and looked away again. The outburst from Sirius was coming, and all he could do was brace himself for it. 

“You slimy piece of shit,” Sirius hissed at Peter. “You—you think this is about you?”

“What?” Peter asked.

“Sirius, come on now,” James said. “We’re just having a chat, all right?”

“Yeah, we are having a chat, about how all of us living together here was fun and games, Hogwarts Years 8 and 9 and 10, but then there’s a _baby_ involved and that’s just a bit too much, a bit too real for Pettigrew. Like we haven’t been fighting a war and hurting people and getting maimed and watching our friends die for the past _three years_. If this hasn’t been grown up and _real_ enough for you, you haven’t been paying attention.” 

They were all still, all of them looking from Sirius to Peter to see what the next volley would be, whether Peter would crack under Sirius the way he did when Sirius lashed out and needed to hurt to bring himself back under control. Usually Sirius could save it for a run under the full moon, he as a dog and Remus as a wolf snapping at each other, fighting and hurting and biting each other, the only two who could really go head-to-head in their animal forms.

Sirius was always hurting and so he always wanted to hurt; Remus could understand that all too well. 

Instead, Peter looked Sirius in the eyes and nodded. 

“Exactly,” Peter said, his voice low. “It’s real now. It’s been three years and even with the war, _they_ have each other. _They_ have a family and I don’t. And neither do you.” 

Remus went for Lily, pulling her away to the other end of the room. He tried to do the Bogart thing from _Casablanca_ , where he and his height and his big shabby sweater could wrap Lily up in his arms and hide her face in his shoulder, but Lily wasn’t having it. She shoved Remus aside and the two of them watched: Sirius lunged for Peter, Peter threw a punch, and James dragged Sirius outside, not with magic but with his arms wrapped around Sirius’s waist, dragging him out to the lawn where maybe some of their sound wards would keep the neighbors from noticing their domestic spilling outside. 

Remus grabbed Lily's wrist, but she threw him off again. “Remus,” Lily sighed, before she chased the others out the door. 

Remus followed. 

Later that night, in their room down the hall from James and Lily, Sirius nudged Remus’s bare shoulder until he turned to face him. 

“We’ll stay until the baby’s first birthday, all right?” Sirius said. “I remember from all our awful extended family just how much work babies can be, so we’ll stay for the first year and help out with the baby while it’s still a screaming shit demon. Then we’ll go.” 

“Just what I always wanted,” Remus said. “I survived the war and all I got was someone else’s screaming shit demon.”

“That’s not nice,” Sirius said.

“That’s rich, coming from you.” 

“What the fuck? Do you want to get out of here, too? You and Pete plotting behind our backs? Both of you trying to make good, find a wife and kids and a place where that fucking genocidal maniac won’t find you? If we’ve learned fucking _anything_ , it’s that he’s going to find you.”

“It was a joke.”

“Was it?”

“It was,” Remus said. “I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“You are. Do you want to be?”

“I do.” 

“I do, too.” 

“It’s settled then,” Remus said. “We’ll stay until the baby’s first birthday.” 

“Or until we die,” Sirius said. “Whichever comes first.” 

“Sure. I thought we were trying for optimism, but let’s go with that.”

Sirius sneered at him and turned to his other side, giving his back to Remus. “Everyone’s a fucking comedian tonight, aren’t they?”

“You’re the one making plans for two years from now.”

“Eighteen months. We can do it.”

*

They made it seven more months at the Potter house before Remus ruined it for everyone. 

Lily was due August 3 and the full moon fell on July 27. Lily told James to go with them when they transformed, his last full moon before he became the father of a newborn, but Remus and Sirius pushed him to stay behind because one responsible adult had to stay with Lily at all times and it was becoming increasingly clear that Sirius was never going to be that responsible. 

So Remus screamed into his new form, ran off the Potters’ property and into the woods to the edges surrounding Godric’s Hollow, with Sirius in hot pursuit. It had been a disgusting summer, made more miserable by Lily’s physical misery, and there was nothing any of them could do about it but refresh cooling charms and try to freeze the fan blades without _freezing_ the fan blades and experiment with transfiguring something into a literal fucking glacier, but the atmosphere wasn’t having that. 

Finally as dogs, they could run into the night and pant and dive into a stream and they could forget what skin felt like for a few hours, just a few hours where they didn’t feel exhausted and dying, like they’d never take a full breath in their own skin again. 

They had left the stream and wandered towards an unfamiliar part of the woods, towards the edges where the woods ended and houses began again. At the first glimpse of light from the upcoming house, there was a curse fired at them and Remus’s impulse was to run _at_ the thing trying to hurt them, to run and defend. Then there was Sirius barking next to Remus, stepping out in his Animagus form in front of Remus, snarling and barking until another curse launched at them, right over their heads. Remus turned and ran back into the woods, but Sirius stayed. There was yelling from somewhere, human yelling, and Remus knew they had run too far, taken a wrong turn, and they had to go, _they had to go_. 

Remus, as a wolf, laid in the underbrush of the woods and watched Sirius, waiting for him. Suddenly, Sirius turned around and ran, with a short bark at Remus to urge him to follow. No more curses were flying at them, but they ran until they found the well-worn paths through the woods back to Godric’s Hollow, back to Lily and James. 

Before they arrived at the house, Sirius turned and crashed into Remus, the two of them stopping at the edge of the woods that would lead back to the village. Sirius reverted to his human form and put his hands up on the sides of Remus’s face, his wolf face, scratching his fur and calming him before he spoke.

“What a fucking scare,” Sirius said. “It was Frank and Alice’s house, their secret Auror house that no one’s supposed to know about. They both came out, Frank with his wand firing and Alice behind him, big as a _house_. We should get back, take you into the basement in case Frank rounds up some of his guys and tries to follow, catch the wild dogs that suddenly showed up on their property. Are you okay to go inside? We can stay out, if you need it.” Sirius sighed. “I never know how much you understand like this. I know you remember what we did, but words and shit. Do you understand? Are you okay?”

He did and didn’t understand; he understood _Frank_ and _Alice_ , and understood _Sirius_ and _worry_ , the way Sirius kept looking around and listening to make sure he was the only person around at night. Remus brushed against Sirius the best he could and led the way, quietly, calmly, back to Lily and James’s. 

In the morning, Remus woke up on Lily and James’s basement couch, the one down there for him, the one Sirius had dropped him onto when he had transformed back. A big couch, wide enough for a massive wolf to collapse on, wide enough for two skinny twenty-year-olds to curl up together in the early light. Sirius shifted against him, his nose buried in Remus’s hair, less awake than Remus. 

“Frank and Alice were shooting at us,” Remus said quietly.

“Mmm? Yeah. Can’t blame them. We found their secret Auror house. Do you remember me telling you that?”

“I remember you saying _Frank_ and _Alice_. I remember curses coming towards us.”

“Yeah,” Sirius sighed. “It’s all right, I remember the path, we just won’t take that one again. Alice is big now. I thought she had gone deep undercover for the Aurors, back to her Pureblood relations, but turns out she was just knocked up. Big as Lily, too, like either of them could go any day.”

“We should go,” Remus whispered. “Some of our best friends didn’t tell us they were expecting, all while living in a secret house a short run from here, one invisible to wizards but not to animals. Sirius, we should go.”

Sirius tensed behind him. Now he was awake, but Remus hoped it was too early to fight.

“It was just a misunderstanding,” Sirius said. “We’ve never—”

“Really? I’ve never hurt anyone? _You’ll_ never hurt anyone?”

“Are you _ever_ going to stop bringing up the willow thing? It was a prank, we were just kids—”

“In case it somehow fucking escaped you, we’re going to be living with a child literally any day this week, a helpless fucking newborn born in the middle of a war. In running distance of us is another child, another helpless newborn, whose parents will _absolutely_ shoot to kill, and who can blame them when they’re at the top of the enemy’s hit list? Also, once a month, I turn into a murder machine that I can’t control. Do you really think I can stay?”

“So Pete left because he wanted a wife and a baby, and you want to leave because you _don’t_ want a baby?”

“I want to, _maybe_ , get through this war alive and not accidentally kill our godson in the process, you selfish _fuck_.” 

Sirius held Remus tighter and pressed a kiss to the back of his neck.

“You can’t leave, not when you’re the only level-headed one around here.”

“That’s the wolf’s fault, not mine,” Remus said. “I _have_ to be level-headed, because all my life I’ve had one night a month when I rage and I hunt and I break my bones and I terrify people and the best Aurors in the country were ready to kill me because _I am a threat_. Lily and James would do the same. Do you want to do that to our friends? Do you want to make them choose between killing their child or killing me?”

“It’ll never—”

“It just happened last night! Hours ago! It _just happened_ , Sirius!”

Sirius's arms were still around Remus's chest. The more Remus spoke, the tighter those arms wound around him, the tighter they held him, the harder Sirius buried his face in Remus's hair, his neck, to keep him there. 

“What happened to eighteen months? What happened to the kid’s first birthday?”

“That was before we were almost cursed to death last night, wasn’t it?” 

“We’re going to be cursed to death any day, we might as—”

Remus wrenched himself out of Sirius's arms so he could sit up on the couch and looked down at him. “We might as well _what_? Do you—are you honestly so resigned to dying that it doesn’t make a difference to you how it happens?”

“What a surprise,” Sirius said, dry as anything. “Remus the werewolf mauled me to death, or one of a dozen Pureblood boys who exchanged handjobs with me at their father’s annual Christmas party murdered me. Bit of a photo finish as to who gets to me first.”

“It was fun, I think, when you were a bit of an asshole, enough to make you more interesting than the shitheels we went to school with,” Remus said. “Not so much anymore.”

Sirius rubbed at his eyes with the heel of his palms, then nudged Remus off the couch so he could stand up. “Come on, then, let’s go upstairs and tell our best friends we’re abandoning them and their child.”

“Fuck you.”

“What? It sounded like a great idea until—”

“Until we almost died last night!”

“It was Frank and Alice.”

“Oh, I know, they care about us a lot and they would have been _very_ sorry when we died and our dog bodies transformed back into Remus and Sirius.” 

They headed upstairs and as furious as they were at each other, they still—

The nuclear option was there, right there in front of them, and one kept waiting for the other to use it. 

_You could leave without me_. 

It stayed there between them. 

*

“Good timing, I suppose,” James said when Remus announced their decision to leave. 

“What, because the baby isn’t born yet?” Remus asked.

James stared at him. “Because one moon just ended, so we have a month to find you a flat.”

Remus looked away while he thought of something to mumble back, but then Sirius took over to share the gossip that Alice Longbottom was pregnant as _heeeeeeeeeeell_ and Lily glowed with far more effervescence than Alice could ever hope for. 

“There’s no game I want to play less except _Who Huffed and Sweat Their Pregnant Body Best_ ,” Lily replied. “I promise. I’ve had a lot of time to lie about and thoroughly examine my options and I _promise_ , I don’t give a fuck about _anyone_ on this earth at the moment except this child and how many more days it has until it tears its way out of me.” 

“Speaking as a man who almost died last night,” Remus said. “That sounds a bit dark.” 

“Someone go out and buy a mountain of newspapers so we can start looking for rooms to let,” Lily said. 

The next day, Monday, after a day of searching the listings in the newspapers, James left the house in the morning and came back around noon with a rolled up deed in his hand that he pretended to hand to Sirius before he handed it to Remus.

“Two hamlets or villages or what-have-you over, my mother’s old friends the Misses Doyle and Burns told me recently they were thinking of finally moving to Spain since the Spanish are just getting over their case of fascism and we can’t seem to shake ours,” James said. “I told them we had nice young friends of ours from school who were looking for a place to settle down—”

Remus gave him a look. 

“So there’s a fully furnished house for you to take over in three weeks,” James said.

“Absolutely not,” Remus said. “I don’t know how you did it—”

“You’ve seen my Charms around this place, you know it wasn’t that,” James replied.

“We can’t _take their house_.”

“Speak for yourself,” Sirius scoffed. 

“The landlord’s very reasonable about expenses, too,” James said. “So. You know.”

“Does Lily know you dropped a sizable stack of gold on swindling a pair of old women out of their home so they can silently rush off to Spain with three weeks’ notice?” Remus asked.

“Right, I’m sure Lily will be _very_ upset to hear I’ve secured a house nearby for our closest friends,” James said. “But just in case, let’s save it as a surprise for after the baby, all right?”

It was a secret until Lily came down for supper, James having spilled everything during their afternoon nap.

“Start packing now,” she said. “Once the baby comes, I’ll make sure you don’t have time for anything but help.” 

“Do we _need_ to pack?” Sirius asked. It was Sirius's day to cook and he was pushing around his plate the roast he had underseasoned and overcooked earlier in the afternoon, even when Remus said it was too hot for a fucking roast but Sirius insisted it would keep and even be better cold. “Since we’ll be helping so much and be here most of the time.”

“Yes, we need to pack,” said Remus.

“Well, why don’t you pack your things, then, and I’ll keep my things settled here until—”

Sirius honestly got _that far_ into his sentence before he realized what he was saying. By then, the table was silent and Remus’s jaw was clenched, jutting out to one side, his teeth wanting so much to grind themselves to dust. 

Sirius laughed loudly, his hair pushed over one ear as he clasped Remus’s shoulder. “Like you’ll have time to escape us except your one night a month, right? Once you see little Harriet or Fleamontia—”

James made a sound somewhere between a gag and a laugh, before he silenced himself again. 

Remus looked at Sirius and smiled, making sure he smiled enough that it reached his eyes, just enough for him to look like the warm and inviting soul Sirius thought him all these years.

“Not like there’s much to pack anyway,” Remus added. 

“Exactly,” Sirius said. “Remember that song? Tramps like us?”

“Shit, just when I thought our long Springsteen nightmare was _over_ ,” Lily laughed, while Sirius and James growled as incomprehensibly as possible something that might have sounded like _baby we borrrrrrrrrrn to ruuuuuuuuuuuuun_. 

Remus smiled again, then looked down at his plate. “I think Sirius was right, that this’ll keep for tomorrow. I’ll run out early tomorrow morning and pick up some bread for sandwiches.”

“I’ll go with you,” James said. 

“Of course,” Remus said. He nodded eagerly and smiled at Sirius again.

*

Early the next morning, Remus found just enough coins in the kitchen’s loose change dish to buy two sacks of fresh rolls from the bakery in Godric’s Hollow. He strolled back to the Potter house, dropped off one sack of rolls, put the other rolls in his bag with all his possessions, and walked away. They had a good run in the old Potter house, but Dumbledore had found him a mission in the north so it was time to go. 

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/screamlet) \+ [reblog](http://screamlet.tumblr.com/post/154905336851/)


End file.
